skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does Obama actually want another term as president?
by Robert Reich.
As I watched the debate Wednesday night I had a brief, passing thought that's probably wrong -- but I can't seem to shake it. I asked myself what if, in his heart of hearts, Obama doesn't really want another term as president? He seemed tired and listless in a way that ran deeper than being worn out from the ongoing demands of the presidency. I don't think he loves politics, certainly not the way Bill Clinton loves it. In fact, I suspect Obama puts up with much of it because he believes it's a means to accomplishing what must be done. But I've been around people who have held that job, and I have a sense of how extraordinarily taxing it can be -- particularly now, in this era of vitriol and partisan gridlock. So what if at some level, perhaps at a level he's not even fully aware of, he doesn't really want it any more?

Romney, on the other hand, strikes me as a man with boundless ambition -- ambition I've only seen in the sons of men who have been president or have sought the job, ambition of a sort that enables Romney to say or do anything and be anyone, turn himself into a chameleon if necessary, to achieve the prize. I don't think Romney loves politics, and I don't believe the energy and passion we witnessed Wednesday night emerges from any wellspring of deep conviction -- in fact, he's changed his position on almost everything. I think the energy and passion comes from his sheer determination to do what must be done, because he loves the idea of himself as president.

So the thought I can't get out of my head is we may have witnessed on the stage Wednesday night two men whose ambitions are trending in opposite directions -- a president who has had enough, and a challenger who can't get enough. I hope I'm wrong.
(http://www.maximumcompression.com/compression_fun.php)

This has a 115 byte RAR file that expands to 5 Mb. You can probably experiment to get a file just small enough for QR code, with huge output.

(Note that using obscure compressor gives a 24 byte file that expends to 5 Mb.)
I wonder how much of their 2-day is actually sent 2-day? Several times I've hit the $4 for overnight and it still came ups ground. I'd imagine at least half of the products ordered are within 2 day ups ground from an amazon warehouse.
The "Most Revealing Job Interview Question" Is an IQ Test
I wasn't saying it wouldn't be received as a complement, after all, it's just as likely that it was offered in all sincerity. I'm just saying that the literal implication could be construed as an insult.
The part of LINQ you refer to works by running a code generator against database schema before writing any code. In other words, it is not a language feature (you can generate code in any language), it is highly complex and it is a maintenance liability. Generally, any kind of code generation is a crutch. Ability to dynamically modify objects removes the need for it.

The way to go in .NET is the opposite direction: Entity Framework with Code First approach.
Armin's implementation of `cached_property` is not entirely correct. Well, it works, but the branch where `value` is not `missing` is never executed: the object's `__dict__` takes precedence over the descriptor as long as the descriptor does not define `__set__` method.

Here is an implementation of `cached_property` I use:

class cached_property(object):

def __init__(self, fget):
self.fget = fget
self.__name__ = fget.__name__
self.__module__ = fget.__module__
self.__doc__ = fget.__doc__

def __get__(self, obj, objtype=None):
if obj is None:
return self
value = self.fget(obj)
# For a non-data descriptor (`__set__` is not defined),
# `__dict__` takes precedence.
obj.__dict__[self.__name__] = value
return value
I agree with your assessment, but the "social games" (Farmville etc.) probably have the highest percentage of addicts, since being an addictive drug is essentially their purpose.
No question about Apple ][ - That was the first computer schools across the country (US) started buying en masse.

To my mind, that is the product that really touched off the personal computer revolution. As you mention, the Mac paradigm shift was about the GUI, Mouse, and taking what they started with the I and ][ to the next, more refined and "product-ized" level.
I'm not confusing it with a CMS at all, it is a CMS. You can use it more as a framework, but as a framework it really kind of sucks when compared to Code Igniter or zend, or even Yii.
This has been done! You can use the BARF utility to compress any file by at least one byte... assuming your filesystem allows filenames long enough to handle the encoding :) http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression/barf.html
Key words "for me". Just because you can't manage to control your habits doesn't mean the game is "bad for society in general".

I played WoW for 5 years - usually never for more then 5-6 hours a week. In that time I freelanced and was rather successful for it. I also got married, bought a condo, and did many other things happy productive people did.

I got mocked by friends who insisted I was addicted when they were paying 100-200 dollars a month on new games and spending upwards of 20+ hours a week playing them.

edit: don't play anymore because that type of game is now like melba toast to me. No amount of jam can make melba toast taste good.
You would bring back Steve Jobs second?
You can't compress any arbitrary file, but there are lots of files you can compress.

Proof for the first part (aka the Pigeonhole Principle): look at the universe of files that are 100 bits long. Apply your compressor to each one, so that you have reduced the length of each file to 99 bits. But the number of 99-bit long files is half the number of 100-bit long files, which means that for some of your compressed files, you can't tell exactly which 100-bit long file it corresponds to.

Now, you can perform run length encoding on some files. That looks for runs of repeated bits, replaces them with a special marker, and writes a dictionary to translate the marker to the run. You can look for patterns. This will work... on some files. Not on all.

A good compressor will try several different encoding schemes to do its work, and is going to succeed on files with embedded patterns. For instance, if the file is ASCII text, lots of bit patterns will never occur, and lots will occur repeatedly. If the file is English ASCII text, even more redundancy can be exploited. If the file is a structured data set, there's almost certainly a bunch of repeating patterns.

But for purely random data, there won't be enough patterns repeated enough to exploit.
And then there's the Chaos Monkey who randomly kills anything in sight.
One Year After Steve Jobs: Apple's Evolution
Twitter Open Source: ActiveRecord Reputation System v2.0
The comet only means one thing, boy ;-)
If you read the linked page, you'll see that he considered this, but dismissed it as cheating.

Also, in the end he did hide information in the file metadata, just in a much more subtle way.
Generally, you can't compress every n-bit file into an (n-1) bit program because there are twice as many n-bit files as (n-1) bit programs. So the average n-bit file is not compressible.

On the other hand, there are clearly some files that are highly compressible, and many that are at least a little bit compressible, so it's not as impossible as the challenge issuer made it sound. I'm not sure how you'd calculate this, but if more than 1 in 50 random files were somewhat compressible then it would be a bad bet to issue.
Lossless compression works by exploiting redundancy in the data.

If I want to compress a text file that contains the word 'uncharacteristically' 1000 times, I can simply replace ever occurrence with the a certain short unused byte sequence and record the mapping in the header.

Similarly in an image file, if there is a block of 50 pixels that are all the same color, I can replace that block with a special byte sequence and map the coordinates and color in the header.

But if I have truly random data, there are no patterns to exploit. The shortest means of representing random data - is the data itself.

This is provable using information theory (which in a way is a branch of thermodynamics).
Los Angeles county tried to ban master/slave terminology on computer equipment... http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/
I wonder if this table had been made in 1880 if it would have split the recent past into 10 year increments too. Or 1330, for that matter.

And if in 2220, our past 150 years will be grouped together under some other moniker.
Correct!

What matters is whatever they are blabbering about actually gets them out of office or paints a negative picture to enough people that it makes a difference.

If it is not effective, that's when things get interesting, I believe. It could mean a number of things; younger people are voting more, games are becoming more widely accepted as not a bad thing, for instance.

In the latter case, one could argue that the perpetrators are very much out of touch.
What we talk about when we talk about Steve Jobs
It's really interesting to see the perspective of an older peer when it comes to development. I've been writing code since I was 10 (19 years ago) and have been doing it professionally for about eight years. To look back sometimes and see the differences in myself as a coder and wonder about what it will look like going forward is a favorite wandering for my brain.

I think the one thing that I find most common in my career has been coworkers, within 10 years of retirement, that have just given up and no longer put in what's needed to be a coder. I enjoy the company of someone who has had more experience (it's part of how you learn) and love to hear about the battles that the people before me had to fight.

I start my day by asking myself some questions. Where is the technology at right now? Where is it going? How does it relate to my job? How does it relate to my interests? How does it relate to what I've done in the past? Where am I at as a developer? The problem is that people stop asking themselves all of these questions and start weighting towards a few in particular.
Yahoo had a huge postgres database a few years ago. No idea what they are doing now.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9087918/Size_matters_...

And Skype sounds pretty interesting too.
http://www.slideshare.net/adorepump/small-overview-of-skype-...
You state that video games are fine. WoW is a video game, therefore it is fine. But then you go on and state you think that WoW is not good for society, blatantly contradicting your first statement.

To bring an overdone statement in to the mix: "guns don't kill people, people kill people". It isn't the game, it is the individual who already has addictive tendencies. It doesn't matter if it is WoW, another game, or another activity people who are predisposed to addictive behavior will tend to go overboard on their chosen activity. It isn't WoW's fault (because if it is, then many other games should be brought into this blame list).
Here's an HD version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCicM6i59_I&hd=1
surprised all the comments here are about whether he achieved compression or not. Point = Missed!

the entire thing was an ingenious trolling exercise, as he says, to 'out trick the trickster'. his goal was to exploit the loose wording of the challenge, and prove a point (possibly winning $5k in the process); I found it an entertaining story along those lines.

it proves nothing (new) about compression, or lack of it; he even stats that the consensus at the time was 'unanimous' that no compression had taken place. that's not where the interest in this link/story lies.

thanks for the original link, OP.
This is probably the only forum where this rant will, be relevant, but as someone who has used ThinkPads for a long time (and has a business that sells them), I have to say the "back" and "forward" buttons on the newer keyboards are a terrible design.

I can't even count the amount of things I lost by accidentally bumping the "back" key before I disabled them with third-party software, and people we sell the laptops to have the same experience.

But out of all my years with ThinkPads, this is my only complaint.
That reminds me of an incident when I was in year 8: seeing how deeply nested I could get directories on Windows. H:\a\a\a\a\..., eventually it stopped working. (I played the game with my friend... he went for creating a new directory at each level, after a little I became sensible and went for copying and pasting, thus multiplying the depth by two each level which of course achieves the goal pretty quickly - so I won by a considerable margin.)

The school IT manager (who, incidentally, apart from this once I was always on good terms with) was rather annoyed at me the next day, for the nightly backup had fallen over the previous night and he had found the problem. You see, what to me was H:\ was \\galaxy\users$\chrism, which on that server was D:\users\chrism. So that 256-or-so character path became longer than 256 characters on the server and the backup software hadn't been written carefully enough to cope with what was a perfectly valid NTFS path, but not a valid path for the normal Win32 API function calls.

How was I to know it would do that?
This is NOT a replacement for animated .GIFs. This is just a video that auto plays (and loops) without sound (until you click on it), which is very different than a .GIf.
For those who don't realise, the challenge is to write a function `f` that takes three arguments, the first of which is a function which is applied to the second and third arguments and returned in a pair.

The difficulty with doing this in a statically typed system is that once you've fixed the type of the function you pass in, you can't then apply it to two different types. The standard way to solve this would be to specify that the function you pass in is valid for all types [1]

f :: (forall s. s -> s) -> a -> b -> (a,b) -- [2]
f r a b = (r a, r b)

f id 5 "Test" -- returns (5,"Test")

However, the challenge also specified that you do it without writing a type signature for `f`. I admit that in this case I am pretty stumped. The closest I can get is to first define a wrapper

data S = forall a. Show a => S a
instance Show S where Show (S a) = show a

and then write

f r a b = (r a, r b)

f id (S 5) (S "Test") -- returns (5,"Test")

but that involves wrapping everything up before passing it into the function, to disguise the fact that we really have different types.

There's an interesting point to be made here, though - "wrapping everything up in one type" is essentially what dynamic type systems do, except that it's baked into the language instead of being implemented by the programmer on an as-needed basis.

Here, my declaration for the type S says "any type as long as it has a Show instance" (which allows it to be printed). I could instead have specified "any type that has a Num instance" which would mean that I could pass in a mix of ints and floats, and still do arithmetic with them. I get some of the benefits of dynamic typing (flexibility) but I still get to keep type checking.

The Python approach is "any type, and we'll check at runtime that it has the appropriate methods". So it's ultimately flexible, but as a result loses any form of compile-time checking.

Looking at it this way, I think that the challenge you've set me is one that cuts to the core of the difference between dynamic and static type systems. No, I can't write the function you want in a statically typed language without doing something clever with types. But the clever thing I have to do with types is re-invent duck typing, but in a limited way which still gives me compile-time checking.

Anyhow, thanks for the insightful comment. It certainly made me think...

[1] This requires the language extensions ExistentialQuantification and Rank2Types, but neither of those are particularly controversial.

[2] Note that the type signature

forall a. a -> a

is inhabited by exactly one function - the identity function. This carries over to the Python example too - the function `f` isn't safe to use unless the
first argument is the identity function, which makes it a bit of a useless function to define in the first place.
Used to be a fan, but over the last 2 years or so we've noticed that quality seems to have dropped, especially on power units. Older models go on-and-on, but with more recent purchases we've had a couple of PSU deaths and one laptop died completely when it was impaled on its docking station and had to have its system board replaced under warranty.
So what? The challenge was for the total size of decompressor + compressed file to be less than the original file.
Read again: The sum total of the file sizes of the "decompressor" and "compressed file" had to be less than the original file. So moving data into the decompressor would do nothing.

He did "win" on a technicality: The challenge did not count the size of the filesystem metadata towards the sum, so he hid information there.

Also tuning the decompressor to the specific data-set was entirely allowed, even intended. Otherwise it would be obvious that the challenge is impossible, in this way it depends on a sufficiently random data set.
Detailed comparison between Bootstrap, Zurb foundation, and Skeleton
Not just successful, it's really good too! The API is rather easy to use, it's lightweight and (for small to medium sized databases) it performs really well. Not really suprising it is so widely used.
100% testing is effective, just not 100% effective. And 100% testing is strictly better than 99% testing is strictly better than 50% testing (when considering only its bug detecting capabilities).
Agreed. But that's all very general stuff. Nothing there so much as hints at special treatment for MS's trademarks specifically, which is what I was initially objecting to.
How are ethics involved in WoW? (Sincere question)
There are few founders that are remembered as fondly as Steve after they retire or pass away: Grove, Gates, Hewlett, Packard come to mind.

Something to think different about.
I'm responding specifically to the part that I quoted, which would have allowed the compressor + compressed data to be larger than the original data.
Ask HN: how do you name your business/product?
I'm curious to know how you guys name your products and businesses. Do you follow any particular process? Get help from naming companies? Ever created a name that turned out to be terrible?
Agree about all you said. What third-party software you used?
That's been my view of the two. I prefer Zurb because I know enough CSS now to extend and leverage the framework more and I find Foundation is lighter weight and more flexible and extensible than Bootstrap is. Bootstrap feel more "opinionated" but the javascript components are really, really well written though those are arguably completely portable.

I've got a pull request open to Foundation right now to add some vertical rhythm to their typography if anyone is interested.

https://github.com/zurb/foundation/pull/954
Remove Flicker from your site.
Go see piratebay.org homepage for example of "the flicker" and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Change <!DOCTYPE html>

to:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
So comment threads on HN are now private discussions one has to be invited to?

Like the original commenter I am also tired of the celebrity worship that goes on here (and pretty much everywhere else). Yes, the man died. So do millions of others every day.
Isn't the average gamer a 30 year old male, fully capable of voting? In this case I think the "older crowd" are baby boomers. People born in the 70's and 80's grew up with video games, so I'm guessing they played/still play them/can identify with gamers.
The part you quoted doesn't say that.

Regardless, it boils down to this: Do you feel the rules of the challenge forbid shifting an arbitrary amount of information from the compressed file into the decompressor?
This is why you set up monitoring. You could notice either a) the long-lasting cpu-eating subprocess or b)just the rapid diminishing of disk space.
If it didn't say BBC at the top, I'd assume this was an Onion article.

I'd vote for her because, you know, For the Horde!
Megaupload server seizures finally run into mega-due-process
Good point.

I am also concerned by the growing amount of word alizationing and izing.
28 Articles on Usability and User Experience Techniques
As much as I would like to attribute this purely to political banter, I think it reflects a general attitude in the broader society: video games are still not considered equal to the arts, often considered "a waste of time" and childish. Just look at the reporting when theres been another school rampage.

(Of course, the same crowd clamoring for a ban on videogames has no problems with splatter horror movies in the theater, which from my experience surpass any game in realism and pointless violence)
Excellent! Hale-Bopp was so cool to see. I was hoping for a another great comet to show my son.
I've seen that and far worse in Trade...
What is static program analysis?
Blizzard should make her a skin, and also a super PAC. That would be so great.
It takes someone who doesn't speak English ten seconds to look up the past tense of the verb "bring" - this doesn't mean you'd want to hire as a journalist someone who seems to think the answer is "bringed"

Doing a string reverse is so trivial that it's not about needing that skill, but rather what not being able to do that speaks about the candidate's general aptitude and skill level.
> for all i know, at this scale, they may be treating
> mysql as some kind of distributed hashtable and doing
> a lot more work in higher layers...

If MySQL is just used as hash table, and all of the interesting stuff happens at higher layers, then talking about the number of rows isn't that meaningful.
Steve Wozniak wants ITunes for Android
Previous discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4592865
Oh, I mean in the sense that it is manipulating players into continuing, I think it's ethically questionable.
Well said, John. I don't blame you for not doing the radio interview that night. It hit me a lot harder than I expected, as well. I realized the stuff that I'd used since I was about 10 years old was all influenced or even created by him. But mostly I was sad for him and his family -- here he had worked so hard for everyone else's benefit all his life, and never got to fully focus on or enjoy his family life. Sad.
I've had a lot of fun explaining why it's important to reap your zombie children on many occasions.
NHS staff should code - Kelsey
Tim Kelsey, the NHS Commissioning Board’s first national director of patients and information, is to encourage doctors and nurses and other front-line staff to learn how to program.
Can a product be cool twice?
I predict that when the world doesn't end in December 2012 the doomsdayers will latching on to this thinking the Mayans were off by a year and that this comet will cause the end of the world.
Every technique is "just a loophole" when it's first discovered.
I have the Intel variant, as I understand it the fusion is a little bit worse. I compare it to various laptops from the likes of Samsung and Toshiba I've had. I'm not calling it the best in the world, just the best I've used. I like how easy it's been for me to mod it too. It is however my first ThinkPad. Others may be much better.
Baby's en kinderen beschermen tegen virussen | Leef Nu Gezonder |
Best practices for scientific computing